Pieces of the Moon
by SaintAugustana
Summary: A story largely based on Gibbs' love for his boat, adapted to my own father and I. No warnings. K for death.


**Pieces of the Moon**Summer 2007, 6.28.07

I remember being little, about five or six, and sitting on the smooth basement steps of my father's house, watching him as he worked on his projects – wood, sawdust, and sandpaper – the last thing I remember him building was a mahogany table, but that was before I had to leave him.

He used to let me come down those stairs and stand in the frame of his latest project – that time it was a new front door. It had engravings along the edges he'd carved himself – he said that one day he'd take me away from the world and we'd live in a house behind the protection of this front door. I didn't care where we went, as long as we were together.

I rubbed my hands along the frame and felt the depressions, closing my eyes. It was almost as if I could feel the words he could not himself say. The first time he gave me a piece of sandpaper I sent it running over the smooth face of the wood as if I had been doing it since birth. Like my calling to see something deeper, know something more about this underground life my father found therapeutic – his haven. He let me into that world, and as I ran that paper over the frame I remember looking for any kind of disturbance in the wood – some kind of defect, a malfunction that could be fixed, smoothed over and made new again.

When he'd reach over and blow the sawdust into the air, the wood glinted in the sun streaming through the little window like tiny balls of light, pieces of the moon fallen to earth, angel feathers in the underground of this world we had molded together, melted, and then re-forged every time we made something new.

_Try to catch them before they hit the ground_, he would say to me, and I would reach out to his malleable soul and he would lift me up. Together we danced in the light of the sun, invincible. Watching him laugh was genuine joy for me – he made the moments complete. More than once we slept down there together – him in his hammock and me on his stomach, undulating slowly with his low breaths, waiting for morning to come so that we might embrace the light it brought together.

And then, one day, the time came for me to leave him, and I walked back up the stairs of that basement, never again to help him with the building of his haven. Somehow, though, he always seemed to leave that door unlocked, and I would still come to sit on the smooth steps and watch him work sometimes – he never knew I was there. I indulged in his hands running over the wood, and the time he spent asleep in his hammock, a pillow on top of his stomach to make up for the weight he'd lost the day I had to leave him. The balls of light that escaped his grasp from that day forward he'd whisper to in the darkness, "_those are for you, baby." _And I'd take them into my soul and hold onto the moment. I was in an ethereal place now – home in my father's basement, loving him as he started on new project: a miniature coffin, ornate and beautiful. We both knew who it was for.

When he left that evening for homemade coffee in the kitchen he brushed right past my faded form on the steps without looking back or down. I could see in his soft, silver eyes he was trying to hold himself back.

I went down to see my last bed. I rubbed my hands along the frame and felt the depressions, the engravings – tasting in my mouth the bittersweet words I knew he could not say – words I knew were gone from his soul and mingling now with the sweat and blood in the wood grain of my coffin.

I could not pass from this world in my father's underground haven until he was finished saying what he had to say – until he finished the construction of his greatest gift to me: a chance to rest inside a part of him that he knew would be strong for me when I would make my journey to a place I never thought I'd have to go without him.

It was then that I wanted to be there for him again – tell him how much I loved him, but I couldn't. I'd missed the opportunity. The door had been closed on this life we'd made for each other. I started searching for a warning sign – something internal hit the notch of desperation, looking for something to satiate my desire to go back to him and leave my fate behind, but there was nothing left for me to hold onto. He came back down the stairs and crawled into his hammock. I waited there until he fell asleep and the moon came through the window, then I stepped up to his side and smoothed back his hair, knowing he couldn't feel my hand on his forehead.

I wanted to tell him, but I was gone, never to return to his haven or crawl back into his open arms.

One night as I peeked down at him from my place in the clouds, I saw him standing alone in the black night, beside the carnage and flames outside his haven – the door had burned to nothing more than a memory of a place neither one of us would ever have the heart to go back to – his words were destroyed and free now from the confines of his soul. I caught them as they floated up to me.

He said, _"I love you, baby, oh, God – I loved you so much...please wait for me...I'll find you, I promise."_

He ran a boot over the burnt frame of our door – the door that, with it's destruction, sealed the passageway to another world in which we would live together.

"Dad, for you I'd wait until Kingdom Come."

And with that, while still within the boundaries of this new world in which I had come to reside, I came down to be with him again and laid an invisible arm across his shoulder as he went down to his knees, me holding onto _him_ now while he cried for the first time since I had to leave him.

The moon broke in half that night, scattering all the little pieces of light across the sky – like stars, but bright – like my father's glazed-over eyes as he stared out at this ethereal canvas, and I looked at him, an overwhelming warmth enveloping me.

I caught them before they hit the ground.


End file.
